This week we have a presentation, the purpose of which is to introduce the basic information of our work and the progress so far. We have made a 43-page PowerPoint presentation, and the progress so far is that the 3D part has been roughly done, only to give the model materials.
I’ve recapped our animation ideas：Funny themes: Twist And Shout（sekko to kaeru）
Basic concept：
Initially, we made this animation to realize the theme of virtual and real worlds, belonging, and virtual communities.
For us Chinese art students, we agree that a studio is a place where we accumulate experience, maybe it is where nightmares can originate, and it might be where a sense of belonging can come from, so we also believe that criticism of art is a very personal and subjective act, which is why we chose the virtual space, which is closer to the environment on the internet.
Our theme is the virtual and real worlds, with the drawing room as the primary setting. We highlight the ‘fantasy’ element by comparing the actual drawing room with the virtual one. We have three main 3D characters and a 2D element throughout the animation to represent the current situation we want to show.
The story follows a real-life studio where the students’ drawings are uploaded to the virtual studio without permission and critiqued at will by the virtual community. Here the act of ‘scanning and uploading’ shows the message that any object in the virtual community can evaluate the painting and represent all human groups, which is why we have chosen three sculptures instead of human figures. objects of criticism representing people of other countries, ages, races, religions, and colors. The animation shows the three prominent sculptures having different opinions about the painting, which emphasizes the subjective nature of the act of ‘criticism.’It is a nightmare for all of us to be criticized from such personal behavior, so we have simulated this scenario through a virtual community and used 2D characters – three tiny frogs – to represent people who are criticized, who may go unnoticed, who may be disgusted, who may be noticed and listened to, and the three different frogs also represent the personality of the authors of arts. By doing this animation, we can show our embrace of the pain and the wish to overcome it with a sense of humor.
Last week, our group finished making the furniture in the virtual scene because it was made in C4D. After importing it into Maya, I found some modifications to the model, so I combined the scene and the model and finished the model of the whole virtual scene.
I started to animate the scene with the model according to the storyboard. At the moment, we are doing the most straightforward animation, some details will be added in the future, so I also made the 3D animatic so that the 2D animation students can start drawing drafts.
The giant puppet hand model in the scene is an adaptation of a commercial model. We have modified this model so that it can be controlled by the finger joints and turned into a flexible hand.
This week I finished all the 3D animations. I animated the virtual worlds and used AE to make a 3D storyboard with some of the 2D drafts I had already done.
The animation we have now is only for the 2D students as a reference, as we finally chose to add 2D animation on top of 3D animation, so the 3D part is by now a large part of the way.
Here is the PowerPoint for our presentation, which gives an overview of the current process of our group: